writer | naturalist | lover of parks & wild lands

Posts from the ‘Mental Health’ Category

How do you deal with depression? There are probably as many possible answers to that as there are depressed people. To some extent, you put your head down, grit your teeth, and plow through it. But that's incredibly tiring. And the thing that scares me the most is that you can get through it--you can beat it--but you never know if it's gone for good.

Three days ago, on March 26, I announced that I would dedicate my 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hike to HIKE for Mental Health, a nonprofit that directs donations to mental health research and preservation of wilderness trails. While building my fundraising page, I hesitated over what dollar amount to set as a goal. I settled on $500, which seemed a modest but attainable figure.

I vastly underestimated the generosity and caring of my friends, family, and readers. Together, we surpassed that $500 goal in just two days. I decided to step it up and go for a new reach goal of $2,185, or one dollar for each mile of the AT.
That new goal seems unattainable to me, but perhaps that is fitting: for many people, the very notion of walking all the way from Georgia to Maine must seem like an unrealistic fantasy. Lots of things are like that, though, unimaginable right up until you try.